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What is mobile advertising? By Annie Turner Director BKI Media
As we have seen online, one of the most effective ways to drive advertising revenues without diminishing the users’ experience is for search to trigger the presentation of clearly labelled sponsored links in the results. It is paramount that these links match the search criteria and the emphasis must be on quality, not quantity. To ensure this is the case, every time, the search engine should log each search and draw on everything it knows about customers’ behaviour to serve up the most relevant adverts. Logging and analysing how and what users search for and their click-through behaviour means that the operator can constantly refine their understanding of what the user wants and deliver it to them. So long as this constant process is underway, mobile advertising couldn’t be further from the misconception that it constitutes SMS spam. Done correctly, the result blurs the barrier between advertising and content to the advantage of all parties. Operators enable their customers to find what they are looking for, while the advertiser generates traffic (perhaps with the potential of conversion to sales, but that is not necessarily the aim). Consumers are likely to use search more because they found what they were looking for. It’s a virtuous circle: more users see relevant ads, advertisers sell more and/or drive traffic to their sites meaning operators can charge a higher cost per thousand impressions rate (CPM), up to EUR 20 to 25 (USD 28 to 35) or cost per call/click, as appropriate. There is a school of thought that full page display ads and banners are the way forward for mobile advertising. They certainly have a role to play, but the same rules apply. There is no clearer indication of what the customer wants than what they are searching for – this information exceeds all other contextual or demographic targeting for banner ads. Display ads will only be successful if they are triggered through search to ensure they are presented at a time and in a way that doesn’t annoy and alienate the consumer. Whatever the ad format, search engines are the most powerful way to target adverts, The best search engines work alongside the operators’ systems which track billing information, location and browsing histories for each user. This combination of a search engine and the operators’ network assets is the simplest, most effective way to deliver the most accurate search results including the most apposite adverts. At the moment, 50% to 60% of ad campaigns involve a call to action, for instance encouraging the consumer to download a game or other item. These types of adverts used to account for a far higher percentage of mobile campaigns, but now advertising is fulfilling other roles like branding, or driving traffic to mobile sites. At the same time, there is a blending of different forms of advertising – including interstitials, sponsored content and video – as brands begin to move into mobile and more users have smart phones that can properly display these types of ads. And brands are increasingly getting involved. Sony Ericsson recently promoted a new phone range and brand through sponsored search and measured the campaign’s success by how many users interactions it generated on its micro-site. MTV uses paid search to drive targeted traffic to its mobile sites and car manufacturers have been quick to recognise the potential of mobile advertising, for instance to encourage people to go for test drives. It’s no surprise that Samuel Martinez from BMW recently commented, “We believe mobile advertising contributes to the general cohesiveness of our communications strategy and will only become more important over time.” Consumer electronics, TV channels and cars aside, makers of chocolate bars or soft drinks have used mobile to reach a mass audience, in particular as part of a wider (or 360 degree) advertising campaign. Cadbury’s ran a highly successful and innovative campaign in its home market, the UK, back in 2002. Coca-Cola has deployed mobile advertising in markets as diverse as Germany and Mexico over the last five years, simultaneously proving that funky downloads to the mobile are a natural fit for search-based advertising. Indeed incentives have proved very popular with brands – from promotions to win prizes, from a free can of drink, to a cash prize, cinema tickets or a free pizza. The attraction for the advertiser is that it is simple to track how many people responded to the campaign and what the outcomes were. However, except for a few shining examples, the majority of marketers have a tendency to look at mobile as an advertising channel in isolation. With time, as marketers better understand mobile’s potential, this will change. As mobile advertising evolves, operators are working to strengthen their position as the gateway to the mobile web. The plan is to capture the advertising revenue by logging and analysing information about users so that they can serve up a better experience and drive the volume of searches. As the volume of searches increase, operators will be well placed to translate the intelligence from the search engine into refined categories of user behaviour, built up from detailed personal profiles. Eventually hundreds of millions of searches will lead to the identification of precise, constantly updated and categorised users’ profiles, all which can be exploited and monetised.
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